Quantifiable or not, surely by getting input from stakeholders -- whether from an internal social network or broad public social networks -- an organization has a much bigger opportunity to improve its product or service, simply because users (whoever they may be) have a simple way of communicating? Granted, many studies find those who are dissatisfied are more vocal than those who like something so that must be taken into account! But social media is also a great tool for education, whether it's about a new internal service or a brand new product, which is crucial to success.

Surveys and questionnaires can provide some insights for sure. Especially when a comparison is done before and after implementation. I would just make sure that the survey is measuring something related to the goals of the implementation. If it is not done before and then after, they But while they still can provide some information, but that information will will be more anecdotal.

Surveys and questionnaires can provide some insights for sure. Especially when a comparison is done before and after implementation. I would just make sure that the survey is measuring something related to the goals of the implementation.
If it is not done before and then after, they But while they still can provide some information, but that information will will be more anecdotal.

I find that to measure anything (innovation, business value, effectiveness) associated with social business or esn or any new technology implementation your best bet is to do a somewhat controlled "experiment" , measuring before and after implementation while trying to keep as many unknown variables from impacting the data.
If you implement an #esn, define what your goal is, determine how you will measure and show you have met your goal, and then measure before and after the tech implementation.

As products and services become increasingly complex, firms have to communicate with their consumer base to a greater extent, and communication needs to be both-ways, that leads all the way to the CEO. For example, Microsoft was initially to require the Xbox One to perform a check function, once every 24 hours in-order for the console to work, but later Don Mattrick read a blog in which a submariner stated that it would be difficult to provide 24/7 connectivity to the console, and changed its online requirement.

Product documentation creation has been an important process since a long time but recently, online reviews and more importantly, positive online reviews can make or break a product. Amazon understands the value that these reviews provide to their site, that why Amazon removed Mediabridge's account when the company tried to sue a reviewer. Beyond information that documentation and reviews provide, a public process also introduces a kind of peer review process.

Measuring performance levels becomes a little complex as different business models would result in different outcomes. For instance, if a firm is mostly proprietary, then detailed information sharing would be limited, but if a firm is mostly open source, then this model requires economies of scale, a large developer community and partnerships, etc., resulting in information that is anything but limited.

Dennis -- Return On Information / ROI for social collaboration comes up routinely on my blog. The keys are to understand return on information (what you put into the system) vs. return on investment (the dollars you put into the system) and what you get out, routinely through business process excellence and occasionally (and more substantially) through epiphany, insight, better decisions due to better and more immediately available information.

In cases like Alcoa Tackles IT Projects and Compliance, a Deloitte study calculated a 62% return on adopting TeamPage for a compliance process. Great result, but this is an example of a simple routine improvement in process vs. the more substantial benefits they achieved by cutting ERP deployment time by 50% (saving many months of IT time and, more importantly, accelerating the business which could achieve greater monetary return by using the ERP sooner).

In a very early case study -- Dark Blogs Case Study #1 - A European Pharmaceutical Group -- a firm deployed a system to share market and competitive intelligence information. In at least one case, the passage of information changed a multi-million dollar negotiation only moments before it was to begin. The return of this nature simply isn't quantifiable because this is one of many practically serendipitous human to digital to human connections that pays off in massive numbers.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.